Joe DiMaggio: The Hero's Life (Touchstone Book)

by Cramer, Richard Ben

  The newspapers played it big—and wrote it as a catfight over the Great Man: the ex–Bride of Clipper against the future Mrs. Joe. What a tasty little contretemps! . . . But Dorothy insisted she had nothing against Marilyn. “I’m only trying to make a better father out of Joe,” Dorothy told the papers. “Joe has never really exercised his privilege to see the child. When he did, he never spent more than a few minutes with him, sometimes shoving him off on his men friends to take him to the movies.” The pool scene with Marilyn was just the last straw—“although, good heavens, I’m not a jealous woman!” With her own family, Dorothy was more candid. She told her sister, maybe Marilyn was a sweet, darling person. But they’d put Butchie in the pool, and then they’d go shack up in a bedroom somewhere!

  This time, DiMaggio wouldn’t give her a pass in court. He hired a lawyer of his own, by the name of Loyd Wright, Jr. And Joe took the stand, to reveal he was going to seek custody of his son as soon as his own situation was “more settled.” He was already paying the boy’s school fees—and the cost of summer camp. He had already given Miss Arnold more money: even last year he sent her two thousand dollars when she said she’d have to sell the fur he’d given her as a gift. He’d sent a piano for the boy. Miss Arnold sold it . . . .

  It got pretty gamy in the courtroom—down to the matter of who bought the boy his baseball glove. But it was always clear who was winning this fight. Judge Elmer D. Doyle knew a hero when he saw one: he commended DiMaggio for showing on the witness stand the same fine sportsmanship he’d always shown on the ballfield. Then the judge asked Dorothy: “He’s been pretty nice to you, hasn’t he?”

  In the end, Judge Doyle called Joe Jr. into chambers for a two-minute conversation, and then came out to give Dorothy the bad news. Her petition was denied. Joe DiMaggio would have visitation rights every other weekend. And no more money. The judge told Dorothy she’d made a mistake by divorcing the Great DiMaggio in the first place. “It’s too bad we don’t have more men like this coming to this court,” Judge Doyle commented, “trying to make good American citizens of their boys.”

  In the aftermath, it came clear who was the big loser. Joe said it had been torture in court. Lawyers and a judge—and the papers—picking through his life. (They hadda run the story big, so they could run Marilyn’s picture. Joe knew their game.) . . . But he was on alert, now. That would never happen again.

  So there weren’t going to be any more lazy days with Marilyn and Butchie around the pool. And Joe Jr. knew he’d ruined everything again.

  WHAT BIG JOE liked best was to take Marilyn out of her town—north to San Francisco. There, he wouldn’t have to be on alert. And, of course, she wouldn’t have to work. They could make up each day as it came.

  There were afternoons when Joe would tell her to put a scarf around her head, put on some slacks . . . and he’d take her to the shore. He would teach her how to surf-cast. Joe could throw a line until it disappeared out over the water, and landed in the deep pools, where they might catch a striped bass, or a salmon (that’s what he said). He taught her to throw it, too. But it wasn’t the same when she did it. She liked to watch him. He was beautiful, the way he moved, and so strong. And then they’d stand, staring out at the sea and sky and the soaring birds, and the only sound came from gulls above and the water at their feet, and the dull, distant grumble of engines in the city behind them. They’d stay for a long time, and then finish up at some bar near the water, that always turned out to be owned by a cousin, or a cousin of a friend, or a friend of a cousin. And they’d bring drinks, and little cups of crabmeat with crackers and sauce that tasted like heaven, and there was never any bill.

  Joe seemed to know everybody, or even if he didn’t, they seemed to know him. But she noticed that in San Francisco, when you knew somebody that didn’t mean you talked. It meant you didn’t talk. One time, Joe said he’d show her the sights, and he got a cab, and they rode all over, up and down the hills, with the Bay sparkling in the distance, and Alcatraz that looked like a huge brown bread baking in the sun, and through the smells of Chinatown, down to the Embarcadero, and up to that tower thing . . . with Joe telling stories of what he used to do there. Then he’d tell the driver some other place—it went on for half a day. And when they finally stopped, there wasn’t any bill for that either. The cabbie was a cousin’s friend, or a friend’s cousin. And Joe hadn’t talked to him at all, for four hours!

  He asked his friend Dario Lodigiani to go out fishing with them. It was Joe’s boat, The Yankee Clipper, that he’d got on Joe DiMaggio Day. They motored back and forth in the Bay all morning—and Marilyn hooked a big one—a striper that grabbed her line and took off with it.

  “Hold on!” Dario encouraged her. “When he lets up, that’s when you reel him in a little, see?” But Marilyn could barely hold on to her pole. The fish seemed to be twice as strong as she was.

  Dario said to Joe: “You better help her, Joe. She’s having a hell of a time with that.”

  Joe said: “She hooked it. Let her bring it in.”

  “And boy, she was struggling,” as Dario recalled. “She had that thing, the pole, stuck under there with her arm around it . . .”

  Marilyn couldn’t hold on with her hands, so she’d hugged the pole to her body with her left arm, while she tried to reel in with her right hand. She had the pole mashed up against her ample breasts, which were pretty well mashed up by some half-bra, anyway . . . to Dario, it looked like a near overload.

  “Joe, you better help her out. She’s gonna pop one of them things!”

  Joe got such a boot out of that, he threw back his head and laughed.

  But she did bring in that fish. She was a gamer. She finally fought it back to the boat, where Joe and Dario netted it in. It was a beautiful striped bass. But then, Marilyn dropped that pole, and wouldn’t pick it up again. She wanted no part of it anymore.

  Joe seemed to like just looking at her there. Not only on the boat . . . . They’d stay upstairs in the old Marina house. Sometimes she’d wake up, and Joe would be standing with his coffee, in the doorway, watching with a little smile. Until she figured she must look funny, and she’d jump up, to do something with herself. Or, afternoons, she’d be standing with his sister Marie, at the stove, watching how she made tomato gravy for the noodles, and talking idly—until something made her turn, and there was Joe again.

  Marie lived downstairs (with her daughter, Betty) and took care of everything in the house. She was seven years older than Joe, and had grown up taking care of all the younger kids. She’d had a marriage that didn’t last—and since then, she’d always worked. She hooked on with Western Union, and worked her way up to branch manager. After that, she got a real estate license, then an insurance broker’s license, beautician’s license. She worked at DiMaggio’s Grotto, then a friend’s restaurant, and then a hotel . . . . There was nothing Marie couldn’t do—though she was just a tiny wisp of a woman. She said their dad, Giuseppe, used to tell her to put rocks in her pockets, so the first good wind wouldn’t blow her away. Marilyn thought it must have been wonderful to have a father home all the time. Marie laughed and said, well, good and bad.

  For Marilyn, the feeling of family around her was half the joy in San Francisco. It was like Marie’s food: strange, spicy, delicious. In June 1953, when Joe’s big brother Mike was found dead—floating between a dock and his fishing boat, in the water of Bodega Bay—Marilyn rushed north with Joe, and stayed with him upstairs in the old house on Beach Street. The house was filled with sadness—mourning cousins, crying aunts, and what seemed like hundreds of strange small men, talking in Sicilian downstairs. It went on for days, before and after the funeral—the men drinking wine, smoking little cheroots; the women in the kitchen nonstop (it seemed like another full meal every hour or two), the marathon of cooking interrupted only for new arrivals (another aunt, another cousin), which would set off another bout of weeping and hugs. They were even hugging her—and tut-tutting over her, how thin she was, and how prett
y . . . and telling her about Joe (such a boy—did she know he bought this house for his mamma?) . . . and laughing when she blushed, as they said she and Joe ought to make some babies. It was the closest Marilyn had ever come to the comfort of a family of her own. When she got back to L.A., she told her confidant, Sidney Skolsky, that visit had opened her heart to Joe.

  After that, San Francisco, the Marina house, became her refuge, too. Having Marie there was like having a big sister for the first time. (Marilyn did have a real half-sister, Berniece. But they’d grown up a continent apart, and had only seen each other once or twice.) . . . Now, the neighbors would see them setting off down Beach Street, Marilyn and Marie—the two Signorine DiMaggio—all dressed up to go shopping. In fact, it was Marilyn who looked the more old-worldly. She wouldn’t put on makeup, and she’d swaddle her white-blond hair in a black scarf, and wear some high-necked black dress (one of those things Joe bought for her)—and giggle with the fun of it: she was incognito! . . . Of course, no one was fooled. Not with four-inch heels, and her famously alluring walk—she was instantly recognizable, especially from the rear. (As the columnist James Bacon wrote, “her derriere looked like two puppies fighting under a silk sheet.”) . . .

  In fact, every day in San Francisco felt like hiding out. And for the first time in years (years she’d worked so hard so everyone would know her) Marilyn embraced that. That year, 1953, she was truly (finally!) at the crest of a great wave. She and Jane Russell had been such a hit in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, the studio put Marilyn right away into another girl-buddy comedy, How to Marry a Millionaire. (That one would be literally huge—in wide-screen CinemaScope—and equally popular.) Everything Marilyn had dreamed of and worked for was coming true. That was the year she and Jane Russell knelt in front of Grauman’s Chinese Theater, to place for all time their handprints and footprints into the cement of Hollywood Boulevard. Marilyn’s song, “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend,” was such a winsome success, she got her first recording contract with RCA. That year, she would make her first TV appearance—for twenty million viewers, nationwide, on The Jack Benny Show. No wonder there were moments when she felt it couldn’t (she couldn’t) go on—that the great wave might turn, and engulf her. After Gentlemen, Marilyn was getting twenty-five thousand fan letters a week.

  MARILYN HAD BOXES stuffed with letters from a year ago, and two years back. (Joe’s advice? Throw ’em in the trash. But she could never do that.) She’d hired her old guardian, Grace Goddard, to file, or try to answer some—just the most important ones. Sometimes, Marilyn and Grace would work half the night, with Marilyn signing hundreds of photos (for big wheels—the studio would provide a list), and Grace stuffing envelopes, to send them off to the favored fans. Grace Goddard was hardly a professional business manager. But she knew who was who. She’d toiled around the studios forever (since the 1920s, when she’d worked in the film labs with Marilyn’s mother, Gladys Baker—that was how she had come to know and care for little Norma Jeane). It was Grace who first told the wide-eyed girl that she would be a star, Grace who made the movies “more real than real life.” So this was her dream come true, as well.

  And who else did Marilyn have? Who else would be loyal to her? Natasha, by that time, was only feeding Marilyn’s uncertainties about her own worth. On the set of How to Marry a Millionaire, Marilyn would finish a take, then instantly shield her eyes from the lights and squint through the darkness beyond for Natasha. Until she got the nod from her coach, Marilyn would demand retake after retake—for hours—till everybody else was limp and disgusted. “Well, I suppose that wasn’t bad, dear,” Miss Lytess would say, with disapproval soaking every word. “But I thought you could do better.” It was like some pathetic hostage scene—with Marilyn powerless to break free. And this tired drama was replayed on every film: sooner or later, the director would banish Natasha from the set. Then Marilyn could not go on—she was unable even to leave her dressing room. She’d send out word that she was ill, and production would stall . . . until Natasha was reinstated—always at a higher wage.

  As the agent Charley Feldman summed up the problem of Marilyn and her coach, in a memo to his staff: “First of all Monroe cannot do a picture without her. I am convinced of this . . . . Incidentally, Lytess wants a helluva lot of dough.”

  Feldman tried earnestly throughout that year to act on Marilyn’s behalf—though he had no contract with her, and no guarantee he would ever see a dime for himself or his company, Famous Artists. She’d dumped her old agent-firm, William Morris, but still, mysteriously (inexplicably, from Feldman’s point of view), avoided signing the new agency contracts he had (gently) proffered three or four times. When Marilyn’s mother had to go back into a hospital, Feldman loaned “the girl” money (that didn’t do the trick); he stepped in to get Natasha reinstated (no help—save to Miss Lytess); he adjured his staff to “stay with this girl and see her as often as possible. Don’t wait for her to call you, but call her and discuss her matters with her . . . . Too much attention cannot be given to this girl at this critical stage of her career, and she will need it.”

  What C. K. Feldman saw in “this girl” (this client—or not quite) was, to a man of his town, trade, and stature, irresistible. Here was a new fascination on screen (already, as he reminded his staff, “the most important personality on the lot”) who had nobody to represent her interests. Here was an emerging megastar whose three films in release that year would bring almost thirty million dollars into the till at Fox—who was “being grossly underpaid, and up to now there has never been any indication from the studio that they want to adjust her contract.” Here was, withal, a young actress who was painfully confused about her future (she didn’t want to be the next Betty Grable—why, Feldman couldn’t quite figure) . . . who would answer her own phone when he called at night, talking like she was underwater (she had to take pills to get any sleep, after she’d worked through her lines with Natasha) . . . who was in tears, exhausted, in ill health, when one of his agents came to see her on the set (she’d pushed herself to the breaking point for three months on Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, and Feldman had to send a man to the studio to get her four days off between pictures).

  Like other men of his age and attainment, Feldman cast himself as Marilyn’s protector. “We must concentrate our efforts in talking with this girl at all times and constantly seeing her,” he wrote in a memorandum to the staff. “ . . . We can be very forceful and direct with the studio in this situation. We can be the heavy . . . .” But as Feldman gradually learned, that role was taken.

  Joe DiMaggio didn’t like to go to the studio with Marilyn. All he could do was stand around all day, drinking coffee, while the crew pestered him for autographs. He liked even less accompanying Marilyn to some movie business party or banquet. That would be just another crowd of phonies. If he was in L.A., Joe preferred to hang around her two-room apartment on Doheny Drive (he’d moved her out of her hotels—photographers always lurking around) . . . stretched out on the couch, smoking, watching TV, and waiting for his girl. Nevertheless, he had particular and definite ideas about her business. In fact, with Joe they were certainties.

  They were giving her lousy parts. They just wanted her on screen to wiggle her ass in front of the whole country. They dressed her like a slut, and gave her come-on lines to say, and made her act like she didn’t know what she was saying. They worked her all the time, they didn’t care about her. They were using her. She was making millions for them, and where was hers? She wanted respect—money was respect. She ought to marry him and quit the goddamn business. But if she didn’t, she had to stop being a chump . . . .

  Little by little, Joe’s contempt for the business, steady as the drip of an old faucet, wore the shine off her pride in all her achievements. Over time, an acidulous drip like that can cut through rock—and Marilyn was no rock. By the summer of 1953, his certainties had become her anguished fears. As Marilyn’s most recent biographer, Barbara Leaming, pointed out: one thing Joe and Marilyn sh
ared was “a thick streak of suspiciousness.”

  If Charley Feldman wondered why Marilyn wouldn’t sign on as his client, he need only have asked what her Slugger advised. (Why should that guy make a buck off your life?) . . . Or if Feldman couldn’t figure why she didn’t want to be the next Betty Grable, it was because he’d never heard Joe on the topic. (They used up Grable until she’s too old. Now they want to put you into her spot in the lineup.)

  By the end of that summer, Feldman had figured out that the best way to get “the girl” to consider an idea was to tell it to “her lawyer,” Loyd Wright. But Wright was, in point of fact, DiMaggio’s lawyer. When Wright and Feldman cooked up a deal for Marilyn to buy the screen rights to a novel, have a script written from it, and then make the studio buy it at a huge profit, it was Feldman who’d have to put up the money (for the rights, and the writer). But the man who would select Marilyn’s first screen property was that noted judge of literature, Joe DiMaggio. (Maybe he read the book, Horns of the Devil. More likely, he got Georgie to read it, or Jimmy Cannon.)

  In August, Marilyn was on location in the Canadian Rockies for her third picture that year, River of No Return. When she ran afoul of her director—it was actually the Marilyn-Natasha drama that pushed Otto Preminger to ugly rage—Marilyn fell back on her oldest trick. (Oh, darn, she’d hurt her leg! It might be broken! She’d have to wear a cast. She couldn’t work.) . . . This time, she also called Charley Feldman to intervene with the studio. But the first call she made was to Joe DiMaggio. She complained that the picture was stupid and they were horrible to her—they threw water on her all day and screamed at her, and she was in tears . . . . So, the Yankee Clipper showed up in Jasper, Alberta, with the lame explanation (for the waiting press) that he was just on a fishing and hunting trip, with his friend Mr. Solotaire. (Georgie had never hunted anything wilder than a corned beef on rye. But he didn’t mind a little camping. For Georgie, anything outside New York—even Pittsburgh—was camping.)